"Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room." — Jeff Bezos, Amazon.
Building a brand is a challenging task, but safeguarding it proves to be even more formidable. Protecting a brand is crucial for a company's alignment, success, and longevity. By "protecting," we refer to considering various aspects—from customers and employees to competitors, and more. For this specific part of our REBORRN OS, we are focusing on the Brand Guidelines we have built and how these reflect on our company's day-to-day life.
⚠️ An important note: For us, REBORRN is internally a constant playground where we can scratch things, create anew, and constantly discover new ways to express and communicate what we are doing. As the digital landscape and market conditions are always evolving, it is important for us to regularly update our brand materials while keeping our core identity intact, such as our Brand Name & Personality. As our team and portfolio grow, we need to ensure that our brand aligns with our overall strategy and remains consistent and unviolated. Below is the most up-to-date version of how our brand story has evolved over the years, leading to today's result.
1️⃣ Our Brand Story
The significance of branding can be clearly illustrated by our experience, as our story begins long before REBORRN was officially launched in 2018. This was the culmination of the hard work and the exceptional reputation our founders had built with their previous company, Mindworks. This had as a result always having eyes on their next ventures.
This may seem like a very advantageous start, but it's actually a Russian roulette: if this didn't work out well, the impact would have been twice as significant.
As you are reading this, things turned out quite well.
When we launched REBORRN in September of 2018, as a team of 7 people, our offering seemed peculiar, targeting four huge and very competitive markets: Strategy & Problem Solving, Product & Experience Design, People Operations, CRM & BPO. But we knew that to stand alongside visionary companies and support their transformation, we needed to develop the capability in all four areas.
Six years later, we took the time to revisit our offering, integrating all the learnings we had acquired from the market, our projects, and our clients. Below is the latest version of it:
While we were ensuring innovation remained a core part of our DNA, this was reflected in our presence in the external world and the brand ambassadors we gained through the years. Initially, we assumed that our biggest supporters would be our employees and clients — it turns out that our most loyal audience consists of people who admire our work and the way we choose to utilise design and communications. This, is one of our proudest moments.
2️⃣ Our Brand Personality
We are a consultancy for the 21st century - and this is reflected both in the way we work internally and in how we express ourselves externally.
— Bold
We choose to be bold: we challenge the status quo, and this requires a great deal of courage and confidence. Being bold means that we remain true to our values and we are not afraid to state our point of view (POV).
— Simple yet Witty
We prefer clear and concise communication, using straightforward language. This doesn't mean being plain; we favour unique and clever ways to express ourselves.
— Fresh
We leverage technology and creativity to stay ahead of the industry curve. Agility is core to our DNA, allowing us to adapt quickly to market changes.
— Authentic
We value transparency and prefer candor over politics, favouring straightforward conversations and eschewing nonsense, as we believe this is the winning strategy in the long term.
3️⃣ Logo
Creating our logo was a journey filled with relentless challenges and bursts of creativity. We needed to infuse our logo with the essence of our personality. We won’t delve into the intricacies of how our name was conceived, yet it's worth mentioning that for us, challenging the conventional consulting model was imperative. This ambition is reflected not just in our actions but in the very way we present ourselves, breaking the mold with deliberation.
The standout features of our logo are the double RR (REBORRN) and the unique N that concludes it.
For practical reasons, we have two variations of our logo:
— The primary:
This variation features solely our brand name, and we favour its use in:
- Activities/Events with which we have been involved previously.
- Our owned media channels, including Social Media and Substack.
— The secondary:
Beneath our brand name, we feature our tagline, “Consultants & Makers”. This variant is preferred in scenarios and activities where:
- Our brand is not yet familiar to the audience — e.g. International Events
- We are positioned amongst various other brands and to give some bits of more information on what we do
- Usually, it's used in more formal activities (e.g., press releases), but this depends on the case.
In terms of colors,
Given the necessity for our logo to be readily accessible and versatile, the colours of our logo adapt to Black & White.
4️⃣ Color Palette
We chose our color palette to be minimal, yet fresh and outstanding. Same goes for our preferred typography.
5️⃣ Decks
We understand that describing our identity as a "breed of consultants & makers" challenging the traditional consulting model isn't a simple task. That's why we've developed a Brand Deck that we commonly utilise and share with our clients and partners.
— Light Credential Deck:
A concise overview of who we are, our services, and our approach to work.
6️⃣ How We Protect Our Brand
We recently refreshed our brand & communications guidelines and established a framework for the use cases—maintaining the fine line where we never set anything in stone, as we wish to preserve the 'playground effect'.
To ensure that as we grow, the entire company remains faithful to its foundations and brand, this is the process we are following:
- Brand Wiki V.2.0 & Consistency To make information easily accessible for everyone, we changed the way people obtain information about the brand by gathering everything in one centralised place. In addition to the guidelines, we created additional branded materials such as templates for various use cases, ready-to-use resources, options for company decks, and communication guidelines. To ensure the brilliant basics are always in place, we have appointed internal brand ambassadors who are responsible for making sure the team understands and effectively uses the materials.
- Employees Education & Onboarding
- Engage Partners:
Considering our team includes members who joined 6 years ago, 2 years ago, or just 1 week ago, we need to ensure everyone is on the same page and updated on the latest iteration of our brand and its applications (what we're no longer using, and how we choose to create materials). The first educational cycle took place as a Sip & Share Session. Additionally, we reconsidered the onboarding process for our new team members by dedicating a portion of it to Brand Awareness, useful links, Q&As, and templates.
With this refresh, we started monitoring our external communications so that everyone can fully capitalise on our brand materials and options.
With thoughtful extroversion set as our primary strategy, we need to ensure that our employees, partners, and clients are equipped with the latest version of our brand guidelines.
7️⃣ How We Continuously Evolve
This journey of refreshing, restructuring, and recreating has given us the chance to fundamentally reassess how we see REBORRN and how we express ourselves. This is why we are now exploring new types of content, new channels, and even different approaches to familiar tasks.
This is an ongoing endeavour, but we aim to ensure that in our next release, we’ll have something new to share with the world.